1958 Trip Part 1: The first days

Okay, you can click on 1958 Trip at any point to get the background and context of what I'll be posting from time to time over the next two weeks. But I plan to use the blog to record and perhaps recover memories of the trip west that I took 50 years ago this week and next. I've already commented on the picture at left in an earlier post
but it marks the beginning: 10 am, according to my scrapbook, in front of the garage of my Uncle Miles and Aunt Kathy's house on east 4th street in Baxter Springs, Kansas, on July 5, 1958, which like July 5, 2008, was a Saturday. The 1958 Oldsmobile which would carry us for two weeks is behind us.

I know that on day one we headed west along route 166. We ate lunch in Arkansas City, Kansas, which is pronounced, as I wonderingly learned then, ar-KAN-sas, being on what Kansans call the ar-KAN-sas river. Same river in Oklahoma and Arkansas is pronounced AR-kan-SAW, of course, but in Kansas it's ar-KAN-sas. For some reason I think I had Salisbury steak at lunch and that it may have been my first introduction to Salisbury steak. Why I know this now I cannot say.

On that first day we went on to Dodge City and I believe spent the night there. I remember going to the reconstructed Front Street, Boot Hill, and other stuff. Gunsmoke was getting big about then, and Wyatt Earp and so on, this being the era of the Western dominance of television, so Dodge City was exciting for a 10-year-old-boy. (Let me add that I'll be adding to this post over several days, till I catch up with the calendar, and that not everything here is being posted on July 7.)

I don't remember that much of Dodge City: vague memories of the Long Branch sa\loon, Boot Hill, etc. And I think we spent the night in motel somewhere in Dodge, but no clear memories. My scrapbook contains a church bulletin from the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, so on Sunday, July 6, 1958, we went to church in Dodge City. I had forgotten that it was a dicoesan see. An interesting sidelight that says a lot about a changing America: the cathedral in Dodge City is no longer called Sacred Heart: It's now Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The next day we headed west to Colorado. I'm not sure where we ate lunch or things like that, but I know that a high point was when the Rockies first became visible. Those of you who know eastern Colorado know it's as flat as Kansas, but at a certain point the mountains become visible. Even so, you drive for a very long time before you reach them.

We headed west to Pueblo and then north to Colorado Springs. I have fairly vivid memories of Colorado Springs, reinforced by the fact that, since my father-in-law lives there now, I've also come to know it well in adulthood. But in 1958 it was a wondrous place, the mountains of the Front Range dominating your views, and me -- to whom mountains had up to now meant the gentle rolling Ozarks -- overwhelmed by it all.

I know in Colorado Springs we visited a number of key tourist sites: the Garden of the Gods; a souvenir joint that I think was the ancestor of the Garden of the Gods trading post that is still a landmark; the "cliff dwellings", a "reconstruction" (read: Fake) but one that we loved and that Sarah loved when she was smaller and we visited her grandpa in the Springs; I think several other sites. We stayed in an old 50's style motel along Colorado Avenue somewhere out towards, but not all the way to, Manitou Springs. One of the photos from our motel shows what looks to me like an old-style Safeway in the distance. Now, there's still a Safeway along W. Colorado Ave (see the link) and I wonder if it was built where this one stood in the 50s. There are still a few old 50s motels to be found in the area, but not the one we stayed at so far as I can tell. The second picture on the left is of the front of our motel, very blurry and taken with a rather poor camera, but with Aunt Kathy (left) and my Mom sitting outside the room. Again, the '58 Olds that carried us gets to make a cameo as well.

I recall that Steve and I kept up a campaign to go to the top of Pike's Peak but Uncle Miles kept saying it was too long a drive, the road was too poor, and we wouldn't have time to do it. After I think two nights in Colorado Springs (the 6th and 7th) we left early for the next leg of our trip on July 8, and as he passed the turnoff for Pike's Peak, we didn't immediately notice him turn up the road to ascend the peak, until we hit the unpaved part. We got to go to Pike's Peak after all.

I remember that as we headed northward, we passed the new Air Force Academy, still under construction, north of town. I believe the famous chapel was already visible from the road. We proceeded on up through Denver into Wyoming, spending the night in Cheyenne. I have a napkin from "The Trail," presumably a restaurant (sounds like a bar) in Cheyenne, probably where we ate dinner, in the scrapbook. It doesn't google up today so I guess it's gone. My scrapbook notes we "almost lost Wyo. because of heavy rain," which may mean we were on the wrong road but I don't know now, and it also notes that this was the only day we "saw two capitals in one day" (Denver and Cheyenne). So there.

The next day, which would have been the 9th of July, we headed on up via Laramie and up across Wyoming towards the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. The Grand Tetons, I know, awed me, and I still have lots of postcards bought of them. Now that is what mountains are supposed to look like. We stayed that night at the Flagg Ranch, a resort/ranch located between the two national parks, and still operating, as you can see by following the link.

No one actually told me at the time, or for some years thereafter, what "Grand Tetons" meant in French. (Go ahead, look it up.) Awesome as the mountains are, I suspect early French explorers must have spent way, way, way too much time in the woods without seeing a woman.

And this brings us to the eve of Yellowstone National Park. Geysers! Bears! Waterfalls! Bears! More Geysers! More Bears! I'll continue from there in a bit.